HandSpy: A New Tool to Study Text Production in the Digital Humanities

Rui Alexandre Alves, Teresa Limpo, Sara Costa, Maria Inês Maia, and José Paulo Leal

Books and Screens and the Reading Brain Conference, Vilnius, Lithuania

One of the positive aspects of the digital revolution is profusion was paralleled by the spread of digital devices and by powerful developments in computing that made it possible to unobtrusively log text production as it happens, and to analyze both production and final texts with powerful analytic tools and techniques. HandSpy is one of such tools, it uses smartpens and sensors to collect handwriting data and several psychophysiological indexes, it also offers a website for visualization and collaborative analyses of texts. HandSpy is particularly suited to carry real time studies of writing and to perform textual analyses on texts emotional content. HandSpy is used worldwide by several research teams. Their published studies will be reviewed along with a discussion of HandSpy limitations, advantages and future developments.

Alves, R. A., Limpo, T., Costa, S., Maia, M. I., & Leal, J. P. (2017, September). HandSpy: A New Tool to Study Text Production in the Digital Humanities. Communication presented at the Books and Screens and the Reading Brain, Vilnius.

Download the communication slides here.